After a two-year break, a group of Hillel at Stanford students returned to Poland. Their visit began with a sightseeing bike tour through Warsaw. A dinner with the founders of the Wondering Women Foundation, refugees from Chechnya, allowed the group to delve deeper into the complexities of refugee life in Poland.
The group traveled to Kraków, where they explored the Old Town, the Wawel Castle, and the Jewish district of Kazimierz, and the city’s vibrant nightlife. From Kraków, the participants traveled to Auschwitz and Birkenau to commemorate all the lives taken in the Nazi genocide.
On the way back to Warsaw, they stopped in the charming former shtetl of Chęciny, with a centuries-old castle surrounded by legends of Polish kings and queens and traces of Jewish history.
The trip concluded with a visit to the Polin Museum of the History of Polish Jews, a cruise on the Vistula River, and a lively Shabbat dinner with Hillel Warsaw students. Plans for next year’s visit are already in the works.
